Fifty Shades Of Green: How Fanfiction Went From Dirty Little Secret To Money Machine

“Bella Swan is drafted in to interview the reclusive enigmatic Edward Cullen, multi-millionaire CEO of his company. It’s an encounter that will change her life irrevocably, leading her to dark realms of desire.”

Sound familiar? The characters are the lovers in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight, but the premise is the same as Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. The erotic trilogy, originally titled Master of the Universe, was posted as Twilight fanfiction on Fanfiction.net under the pen name “Snowqueens Icedragon” in August 2009.

For the uninitiated, fanfiction is fiction written by a fan that features characters from a particular mythical universe such as a TV show or book. Its cousin, real person fiction (RPF), portrays actual individuals—typically celebrities—such as Harry Styles from One Direction.

Though the Fifty Shades itself has been dismissed by many as “mommy porn” and “the Great Idiot American Novel,” James is the most commercially successful fanfiction author of all time. After removing references to Twilight from Master of the Universe, a practice known as “filing off the serial numbers,” E.L. James published the renamed Fifty Shades of Grey with Writer’s Coffee Shop, an independent Australian publisher that was created by fans to commercially publish their work.

The results were astonishing. To date, James has sold over 70 million copies worldwide, including print, e-books and audiobooks. In 2013, Forbes named E.L. James the highest-paid author in the world, with $95 million in earnings, thanks to her massive book sales and a seven-figure paycheck for the first movie adaptation. In 2016, E.L. James was the eighth highest-paid author in the world, earning $14 million in 12 months, which brings her four-year total earnings to a whopping $131 million. With Fifty Shades Darker now showing in U.S. theaters – and hitting the international box office on Valentine’s Day – James’ fortunes will only continue to grow.

For better or worse, E.L. James represents fanfiction in mainstream culture. The success of the Fifty Shades franchise triggered a gold rush, with publishers clamoring to find the next big thing in fanfiction.

James is far from the only fanfiction author to go pro. Before and after Fifty Shades rocked the publishing industry, many other authors turned their passion into professional careers.

E.L. James is the most commercially successful fanfiction author of all time, but she's far from the only fanfic author to go pro. (Photo by Charles Sykes/Invision/AP)

Kirk And Spock: The "Grandaddies Of Slash Fanfic"

The commercialization of fanfiction began before the internet came into existence, back when E.L. James was in primary school. The roots of modern fanfiction lie in the Star Trek fanzines of the '70s and '80s, though some critics would argue The Man From U.N.C.L.E., which predates the Star Trek TV series by two years, started the movement.

Some fanworks featured Kirk and Spock in a romantic relationship, which gave rise to the popular “slash” subgenre. Slash fiction features two or more characters of the same gender in a relationship. "The term slash comes from the way that pairing was written (K/S)," says Flourish Klink, co-host of the Fansplaining podcast. "It was definitely the first widely discussed slash pairing."

“Kirk and Spock are the granddaddies of slash fanfic, which goes all the way back to when fans were writing it out and handing it to each other at conventions,” says Andi VanderKolk, co-host of the Women At Warp podcast. Some authors collected their works into fanzines that were typically sold at cost.

Many fanzine authors would later find professional careers. Lois McMaster Bujold, writer of sci-fi series the Vorkosigan Saga, contributed to numerous Star Trek fanzines in the late 1960s. Sci-fi and fantasy author Diane Duane, who has authored over 10 Star Trek novels, previously wrote fanfiction.

There are many other examples outside the Star Trek universe. Darkover author Marion Zimmer Bradley not only allowed fanworks but published a few of them in official Darkover anthologies. Television writer and producer Stephen Moffat, a former Doctor Who showrunner and current showrunner for Sherlock, previously wrote fanfiction. “I refuse to mock [fanfiction], because I’m a man who writes Sherlock Holmes fanfiction for a living,” Moffat told Entertainment Weekly last year.

Creating and commercializing fanfiction is hardly a new phenomenon, but in the late ’90s, the community got a boost from new platforms sprouting from the rapidly expanding internet.

The Harry Potter series is typically credited with launching modern fanfiction—with a big assist from sites such as Fanfiction.net and LiveJournal, which launched in 1998 and 1999, respectively. Racheline Maltese, now a professional romance author, wrote fanfiction in high school and returned to it after the emergence of J.K. Rowling’s brainchild. "The Harry Potter books were taking too long to come out, so we were going to finish some ourselves,” Maltese says. “A lot of people got into Harry Potter in part because it was a kids' book that had all these adults with tragic backstories floating around that we didn't get to learn because that wasn't really what the book was about.”

Nine years after the last Harry Potter book hit shelves, J.K. Rowling’s magical universe is still one of the most popular fandoms. There are over 759,000 Harry Potter-related fanfics on Fanfiction.net, the most on the site. (Twilight is second with over 219,000 works). Archive of Our Own, established in late 2009, boasts over 117,000 Harry Potter fanworks, the most for any series in any medium, with the exception of TV series Supernatural (154,245).

The most famous fanfiction author to go pro from the Harry Potter fandom is Cassandra Clare. She published her wildly popular Draco Trilogy from 2000 to 2006, several years before James posted Master of the Universe. Shortly before publishing her first professional novel, City of Bones, with Simon & Schuster in 2007, Clare removed all her fanfiction from the internet, seemingly signaling a move from fanfiction to the professional world. “It is notable that Cassie Clare did it first but it didn’t spark the same gold rush that happened after E.L. James published,” says Adam Wilson, an editor at Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, who has worked with fanfiction authors. He credits this to the advancement of the self-publishing market and Fifty Shades’ “taboo” factor.

Clare has been accused of plagiarism and cyberbullying by members of the fanfiction community, which she denies. In 2001, after a Fanfiction.net member accused her of plagiarizing The Hidden Land, a then out-of-print fantasy novel by Pamela Dean, Clare's work was removed from the site

Despite having alienated a number of her followers from her fanfiction days, as negative postings on fanfic message boards and other social media platforms show, it hasn’t held her back from success in the mainstream market. Clare spent three years on the New York Times bestseller list, and in 2012, she signed a three-book deal reportedly in the high seven figures. The movie based on her book, City of Bones, was a bust at the box office, grossing only $95.4 million on a production budget of $60 million, according to Box Office Mojo. Her Mortal Instruments novels has also made it to the small screen as the Shadowhunters series on Freeform. Shadowhunters, currently in its second season, averaged a modest 2.2 million viewers in its debut season, but renewal looks likely.

That said, Clare is still facing allegations regarding her work. Dark-Hunter author Sherrilyn Kenyon filed a copyright and trademark infringement suit against Clare in February 2016. Kenyon has since dropped the copyright claims and the unfair competition claims were dismissed, but the trademark dispute is still ongoing. Clare maintains these claims are "meritless."

Crossing Over From Fan To Pro

Beyond controversial figures such as James and Clare are thousands of authors who have found professional success through their fanfiction, on a smaller scale—but with much less drama.

Racheline Maltese owes much of her success to her fanfiction ventures. Maltese landed her first book deal by responding to a Craigslist posting asking for writers to work on a Harry Potter trivia book. “I sent this guy an email from my mobile phone that was like, ‘Hi, I write Harry Potter fanfiction and have a huge internet following. Also, I have a journalism degree. You should give me this job,” Maltese recalls. She sent links to her work and signed a book deal the next day.

Maltese met her current co-writer, Erin McRae, through a Glee fanfiction community and now writes for serialized novels, thanks to her fanwork. Titled Tremontaine, the anthology is based on the works of Ellen Kushner and is published by the Serial Box Company, which specializes in serialized works. Kushner was aware that Maltese already wrote fanfiction based on her series. “She called me and was like, ‘Do you want to get paid money to do this thing I know you’re totally doing anyway?’” Maltese says.

Maltese doesn’t consider her experience to be unusual, saying she knows over 100 fanfiction authors with similar stories. Cecilia Tan, a multi-genre erotica writer, was a published author with the Big Five houses, including HarperCollins and Macmillan, before writing fanfiction. Finding her career in a slump in the mid-2000s, Tan started writing fanfiction to “stay in shape.”

Like many fanfiction authors, Tan found a creative home in Harry Potter fandom and thrived on the feedback and camaraderie. “I discovered this very supportive community of readers and writers who were immensely talented,” Tan says. “It’s like four or five years after you’ve written something [that you usually] start getting feedback on it… I have in a lot of ways fanfiction to thank for the revitalization of my career.”

After Tan’s agent read her Harry Potter fiction, she suggested that Tan write romance professionally. “I was like, ‘No, no, no. I can’t write romance.’’’ Tan recalls. “She said, ‘Look, you just wrote one.’” Since then, Tan has written 14 romances, with two more slated for this year.

Tan was inspired to write her Magic University series though her experiences with Harry Potter fanfiction, though the two series have little to do with each other. (Imagine Hogwarts was a college and had openly LGBT students who spent more time having sex than studying.) When she sold the four-book series to digital romance house Ravenous Romance, Tan also convinced the publisher to release a collection of erotic short stories based on Magic University’s secondary characters, but she also wanted to let other authors “write in her universe,” including fanfiction scribes.

Unlike Rowling, Tan anticipated that readers would write fanfiction based on her work—so why not get a piece of the action? “I said, ‘This is going to happen, and we need to be prepared for it,” Tan explains. “Now some of those writers have gone on to professional careers.”

Though fanfiction has the potential to generate beaucoup bucks, there is resistance both inside and outside the community towards commercialization. The criticism from outsiders is fairly typical. It’s easy to dismiss fanfiction as outlandish (with wild premises such as “James Bond takes down SPECTRE with the help of Pinocchio”) or perverted (with subject tags like “Dubcon,” which means dubious consent, and “PWP,” which stands for "Porn Without Plot" as well as "Plot, What Plot?")

Putting aside the matter of personal taste, the sheer number of fanfiction titles guarantees a vast range in quality. Consider Cupcakes, a My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction that is widely regarded as one of the worst fanfictions of all time, in which Pinkie Pie kills Rainbow Dash and uses her corpse to bake cupcakes.

Fans can also turn on each other when one of their own turns the hobby into a career. “Fanfiction is a gift culture. We don’t make money doing that. ‘Wow I love this story’ is sort of how we get paid,” Maltese explains. “When somebody goes professional, there is a sense of…selling out.”

Further complicating the transition from hobbyist to professional is the fanfiction community’s often rocky relationship with the high-profile authors they admire. The cases of professional authors taking copyright suits to court are few and far between, but in the early days of fanfiction, legal troubles were a very real concern. For instance, The Vampire Chronicles author Anne Rice is believed to have sent a cease and desist letter to Fanfiction.net in 2001, and is one of several authors that Fanfiction.net users are prohibited from writing about. “There was a point where lots of authors were opposed to fanfiction,” Maltese recalls. “We’d put long disclaimers on stories, hoping that would somehow alleviate legal risks, and Anne Rice kept threatening to sue people.”

Rice is far from the only author to rail against fanfiction writers, but trying to stop fanfiction writers is like a game of whac-a-mole, so most professional authors at least tolerate noncommercial fanfiction. To fans who remember the cease and desist orders from Warner Bros. or Diana Gabaldon saying writing about her characters is tantamount to "selling her children into white slavery," monetizing fanfiction draws unwanted attention and threatens the entire community.

That said, as the fanfiction community has grown and authors’ stances have softened, most fans are supportive when their peers find success. “I have a handful of favorite fic writers,” VanderKolk says. “If they ever went pro, I would be nothing but happy for them because there’s a lot of labor that goes into fanfic that is not rewarded.”

Though fanfiction writers who go professional represent a very small minority of fans, it’s hardly a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon. So why is it treated as such?

The obvious explanation is that fanfiction authors are usually written off. Though Tan and Maltese are far from the only professional authors who are proud of their fanfiction roots, many keep it a secret to protect their reputation. Demon's Lexicon author Sarah Rees Brennan admits that her fanfiction background has been detrimental to her career. "So much bad stuff has happened to me because of it that it feels like I committed an awful crime," Brennan wrote on her blog. "I would never have put the fanfiction up. I did not know the consequences of my actions."

Many authors, however, attribute the lack of visibility to demographics. Romance is the most common fanfiction genre, and fanfiction and romance readers are predominately female. Fanfiction.net reported in 2010 that 78% of their new users identified as female, and the Romance Writers Association (RWA) estimates 84% of romance book buyers are female.

Fanfiction readers are voracious consumers—Archive of Our Own claims to average 25 million page views daily. According to the RWA, the romance industry reaped $1.08 billion, 34% of the U.S. fiction market, in 2013. Despite the buying power of female readers, romance novels command less respect, whether they are posted on Archive of Our Own or published by Random House. “I'm in the romance genre, the genre that makes the most money, but it’s the genre people talk the most crap about,” Maltese says. “A lot of people feel uncomfortable saying they read the genre… so it floats under the radar.”

Fifty Shades of Grey overshadows the rest of romance, which doesn’t exactly help the genre’s reputation. (Consider the following gem from James’ prose: "Now I know what all the fuss is about. Two orgasms - coming apart at the seams, like the spin cycle on a washing machine, wow.")

But from a commercial standpoint, James has elevated the legitimacy of fanfiction and the entire romance genre. Even if publishers or fanfiction outsiders don’t understand why millions of readers enjoy fanfiction, money talks.

“Fifty Shades made so much money… that legitimized it to a huge portion of the audience,” Tan says. “I don't agree with it, but at the same time I'm glad that it shut a lot of the critics up. [Fifty Shades] isn't really brilliantly written, but people love it, and they pay money for it, and that's what matters in this culture.”

Update: The article has been updated for the purpose of clarification, to note the current status of the lawsuit filed by Kenyon against Clare and to include Clare’s denial of the allegations made against her both in the Kenyon case and in the fanfiction community.

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